Comments on: Back Your Files Up

By: Olu

Olu — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 15:31:34 +0000

Excellent post and I hear of similar stories all the time.

I always think it’s a bit like being knocked over by a car or something – it always happens to someone else. Well I’ve been run over twice and don’t take chances now days.

Feel free to view http://www.data-backup-online.co.uk or http://www.data-backup-online......p-blog.htm for more info on automated backups – the blog has a lot of good information on cost comparisons etc.

All the best

By: Dan Wolfgang

Dan Wolfgang — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 03:31:19 +0000

Making backups is important, but there’s another important step to take, too: test the backup. I don’t mean “verify it,” I mean go to another drive or computer and restore your backup–did everything work successfully?

There’s no point in making backups if they don’t do what you need.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 19:41:36 +0000

For those of you doing local backups (e.g. to external hard drives, JumpDrives, DVD-RW, etc.), make sure to keep it OFFSITE when you’re not backing up. It’s not just accidentally deleting files or equipment crashes that destroy your precious data, it’s fires and floods too.

I do the external hard drive thing. It’s in a locked drawer at work. My home computers do weekly/daily incremental backups to a server computer. One day a week I take the hard drive home, plug it into the server and run a script that backs up critical files from the server and the other computers’ backups onto the drive. Since this data is not stored at home, in my constant posession, the drive is encrypted, should it fall into the wrong hands.

By: Sagres

Sagres — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 21:50:46 +0000

I use PSyncX – It’s free, easy and it works.

By: Bert

Bert — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 18:28:25 +0000

Gee, I’m going to sound extremely simplistic here — I could be because I don’t have an extreme amount of data to back-up. I zip the My Documents file and put it on my 2G jumpdrive several times a week. Quick, inexpensive (JumpDrives are coming down everyday), easy, and portable, since I take my back-up out of the physical building to remove it from hazards of fire, tornado, etc. I suspect the odds of losing both my jumpdrive AND hard drive on the same night are pretty slim. Naturally, this is impractical for those who work with confidential data that shouldn’t leave the building.

By: Carl

Carl — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 17:53:15 +0000

I’ve been using Syncback from 2BrightSparks (http://2brightsparks.com/)

It runs on Windows, is totally automated and can backup or sync file to another internal drive, external drive, network share, or FTP server.

I have it scheduled to backup all my design files, emails, etc. And it runs flawlessly on a schedule.

Just set it and forget it! ;-)

By: Ryan Carson

Ryan Carson — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 14:28:19 +0000

I just slap a DVD-RW in my drive and back up everything at 17:30 every Friday. Seems to work great for me.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 13:38:19 +0000

I am just curious, do you all backup your stuff to an external harddrive, dvd, or maybe an additional harddrive?

In my case, I have a 120 gb external harddrive, my main 250 gb harddrive, and an additional 250 gb harddrive I use for storage.

I backup important stuff (not regulary though) to my external drive AND my storage drive.

However, I don’t have a fluid method of backing stuff up. So I need to investigate this as well.

By: Norbert Mocsnik

Norbert Mocsnik — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 17:25:28 +0000

If you can’t find the tool you need or want to have a free backup solution, see my tips on automated backups if you are on Windows (might be ported probably easily to other platforms):

http://norbert.mocsnik.hu/blog.....ckups.html

By: James E. Robinson, III

James E. Robinson, III — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 01:40:19 +0000

Either use rsync that shipped with Tiger, or RsyncX, but do not use rsync directly from the samba site as it does not have full HFS support. RsyncX works, is free, and is scriptable. Always, always, always test your backup. The following will make a bootable backup, run daily to keep your backup up-to-date:


#!/bin/sh

BACKUPVOL=/Volumes/Backup1

sudo vsdbutil -a $BACKUPVOL

sudo /usr/local/bin/rsync -va --exclude "/dev/*" --exclude "/afs/*" --exclude "/private/tmp/*" --exclude "/private/var/vm/*" --exclude "/Network/*" --exclude "/Volumes/*" --exclude "/automount/*" --exclude "/private/var/run/*" /. $BACKUPVOL --eahfs --delete

sudo bless --folder $BACKUPVOL/System/Library/CoreServices